The Space Between

Time-Spans

Notably, Stuart Moulthrop criticizes an NEA report that claims modern media threaten reading, both informational and recreational. The report said that modern media favor instant gratification rather than the delayed enlightenment that is commonly associated with books, and of course the connotation here in negative. Anything achieved quickly is not achieved well. Moulthrop condemns this as closed-minded research that fails to consider that electronic writing supplements print, introducing a new kind of selective reading. “With trillions of documents almost instantly available,” he writes, “there is too much of nearly everything, so attention must be selective” (“What the Geeks Know: Hypertext and the Problem of Literacy” 228-9). Nelson puts in another way in “Opening Hypertext.” He says hypertext has merely provided a system for reading that works the way readers do. Instead of reading linearly, most educated readers skip and skim. Hypertext advances reading technology to meet reading technique (Nelson “Opening”).

Not everyone accepts this idea. In an article published in the Chronicle Review, Lindsay Waters argues that since the Industrial Revolution, Western societies have been urged to speed things up and increase production. This has led to what he calls a “reading crisis” at all levels of study, a crisis he says is only abetted by the Chomskyian idea that children are “neurologically ‘wired’ to use language ‘completely’ in certain ways.” Waters asserts that students need methodical lessons if they are to learn to read properly. Even at the college level, thrift and haste have “pushed aside the pleasure of waywardness in plot and rhyme” (6).

It is ironic that Waters should choose the word waywardness to describe writing, since hypertext is all but waywardness in practice; but let that stand. What he really wants to point out is that the traditional pleasure of reading has been replaced by readings that set out with a goal in mind. From personal experience in the classroom, I know that younger students often go into a reading with the idea that it is a chore to be done quickly and with as little energy as possible. They read for information and to satisfy a professor (and perhaps a reading comprehension quiz), but professionals are no better in some respects. The reader who goes into a text with a theory in mind, perhaps New Historicism or Deconstruction, will read for ideas that jibe with that theory and miss a great deal more. Rather than see readers continue to enter texts with preconceived notions, Waters wants to emphasize the process of discovery that he sees as integral to reading properly, and he wants to emphasize rereading, spending longer in a single text before moving on to something else. A preoccupation with the clock is the bane of deep reading (Waters 6).

Time is of special interest when thinking about the World Wide Web. In December 2006, the Web users spent an average of forty-five seconds on each Web page visited (Nielsen/NetRatings). This relatively short span is the result of two factors as interdependent as the chicken and the egg. First, hypertexts like the Web were not designed to hold readers on one page for a long time; they were designed to let readers proceed at their own paces. But if a reader spends a lot of time on one page, she ignores the links, which are one of the defining characteristics of hypertext. If readers ignore links, there is no purpose to publishing the text as a hypertext. Second, readers enjoy links, and designers know it. Pages are therefore created with little text or text that can be read and understood quickly, like bold headings and lists. The pages’ designs cater to the reader’s fleeting nature. Seeing that most pages are designed with very little text and that no one wants to spend much time on a single page anyhow, deep reading becomes meaningless on the Web. Readers accustomed to the Web are flighty and easily frightened by long blocks of text.

Waters’ critique aims at students and scholars who read “important” works quickly and without what he sees as due consideration; but online reading practices and offline reading practices are often lumped together. Readers who spend most of their time reading online learn their habits there and carry them back into the world of print. This is why, I argue, that younger students—raised with the Web in their homes—are having a harder time living up to Waters’ expectations.

If the reading methods differ, it is safe to assume that the methods of criticism will differ too. Methods designed for print will not work well with hypertext. The answer here, Moulthrop says, is to develop a practical theory of hypertext. He wants to adapt the awareness of poststructuralist literacy to work with electronic writing—something that can only happen when (if) scholars learn to “think of the digital archive not as a component of other tasks but as a primary site of textual engagement” (“What the Geeks Know: Hypertext and the Problem of Literacy” 230). The time for theorizing about the Web is over. The time for theorizing with the Web has come.